→ Widely unknown Exoplanet Astronomer

Artists’s impression of one of more than 50 new exoplanets found by HARPS: the rocky super-Earth HD 85512 b. Credit: ESO

Today 50 new exoplanets where announced by the HARPS team. 16 of them are identified as Super-Earths. One of the Super-Earths is thought to orbit right on the edge of the habitable zone of its star.

ESO Webste:

team has found that about 40% of stars similar to the Sun have at least one planet lighter than Saturn

This is great news and goes to show how fast the field of exoplanet research is moving.

“In the coming ten to twenty years we should have the first list of potentially habitable planets in the Sun’s neighbourhood. Making such a list is essential before future experiments can search for possible spectroscopic signatures of life in the exoplanet atmospheres,”  Michel Mayor, discoverer of the first-ever exoplanet around a normal star in 1995.

More info here.

From the ESO website:

On Monday 12 September 2011, astronomers will report significant new results in the field of exoplanets, obtained with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph on ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile.

On Monday the 12th at 16:00 CEST an online press conference will take place and a significant announcement will be made. These sorts of announcements are not common so I will admit I am very excited. I only hope that what will be announced is something that will broaden our knowledge about Exoplanets and that it is not just a PR stunt promoting a discovery based upon a mountain of assumptions.

It is hard to say what the announcement will be, but that it might be related to a planet in the habitable zone would be a good guess. Think you know what they will announce? Feel free to present your assumptions in the comment section.

Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions

Like wildfire, the news about the diamond planet spreads across the web to the extent where the daily tabloid The Mirror decides to write about it. And why shouldn’t they? It is exciting, right? The only problem I see is that the oversimplified summary of the published result is treated as a certainty. Although this is a great theory, which causes a lot of interest around astronomy and exoplanets, it should be treated with a bit of caution before we start imagining a sparkling diamond planet about the weight of a Jupiter floating around in space. Now is the time for astronomers to debate and discuss the results. Then who knows, once the assumptions concerning the discovery have been constrained we might in a few years time know what part of this announcement was correct or not.  The way the news have presented the announcement makes it seem as if this announcement is the discovery of a diamond planet, which it is not.

Feel free to comment below.

Credit: NASA

Exomoons are moons expected to orbit exoplanets. Although no exomoon discovery has been published to date, there is no doubt that we will find them.

In a recent paper by Simon et. al titeled: Signals of exomoons in averaged light curves of exoplanets they set out to suggest a new method for discovering these exomoons, the so called “Scatter Peak” method. The idea is to study the local scatter in a number folded lightcurves (ideally a 100 or more). It is thought to that this method will allow the discovery of moons around planets with a period of 10-20 days assuming the observations are done during 3 to 5 year long observing campaigns using space observatories.

I find the Scatter Peak method for detecting exomoons very promising provided the three conditions imposed by the authors of the paper are met:

1. The stacking of the individual lightcurves has to be extremely accurate  so that the transit times coincide.
2. The transit observation has to have a continuum (flat part of the lightcurve) which is at least as long as the transit duration itself.
3. The trend filtering must be done so that small deviations immediately before and after the transit of the exoplanet remain unaffected.

A great resource to find out more about exomoons is the recently submitted PhD thesis of David Kipping titled:

“The Transits of Extrasolar Planets with Moons”